Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection laws rattle pro-abortionists

By Dave Andrusko

Next Tuesday the House of Representatives will vote on H.R. 36, the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act. As we have discussed time after time, this bill has widespread public support and is already the law in16 states. An identical version previously passed the House and secured majority support in the Senate.

Pro-abortionists panic at the very thought of a wide-ranging discussion on the merits of tearing apart pain-capable unborn babies 20 weeks (and older). It isn’t an enviable position to be in.

So it as no surprise that the pro-abortion site Rewire ran a post this week that distorted (or conflated) virtually everything their creatively destructive minds could come up with–under the intriguing headline, “Republicans to Use 20-Week Abortion Ban Against Vulnerable Senate Democrats.”

If the bill is (as Christine Grimaldi tells her readers) a hodge-podge of “medically unsupported and unscientific claims,” what is there about it that might allow the bill to be used against “vulnerable Senate Democrats”? She really doesn’t tell us. There is less about how hard it would be to sell aborting pain-capable children to the electorate than there is about how voting for the ban would risk “alienating core voters, especially Black women and other women of color.”

Just a couple of points about a post that runs hither and yon. One is she badly mischaracterizes what Washington Post fact-checker Michelle Ye Hee Lee wrote in 2015.

The important point is not Grimaldi’s confusing mish-mash but this. ACOG CEO Hal Lawrence had held press conferences to “educate” reporters about at what point in pregnancy the prohibition would apply–a very important point. Lee concluded that Lawrence “is incorrect when using the definition in the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act.”

But Lawrence wasn’t just dramatically wrong about the bill’s definition. As NRLC President Carol Tobias wrote at the time

A long piece posted on the CNN website on June 8, titled “The women on the front lines of the latest abortion battle,” quoted Lawrence as saying that only 5% of babies born at 22 weeks survive – yet the widely reported NEJM study found that 23% survive if given active assistance. Rather than point out the disconnect between Lawrence’s claim and the NEJM study, the reporter agreed that the survivors represented “a small percentage.” Twenty-three percent, “a small percentage”?

As we noted last year a nationwide poll taken Election Day by The polling company, inc./WomanTrend for the Susan B. Anthony List found almost two-thirds support for the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act—well more than double those who opposed: 64% to 28%

Support for the bill in the poll extended across all demographic and geographic boundaries. For example